Mark L. Yoseloff, Ph.D.

Biography

Mark Yoseloff, Ph.D. is the executive director of the Center for Gaming Innovation. The center is dedicated to teaching and mentoring the next generation of innovators in the gaming industry. Funded initially by a gift from the Yoseloff Family Charitable Foundation, the center recently expanded its charter after receiving a grant from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development’s Knowledge Fund, as part of the state’s efforts to maintain Nevada’s position as the world leader in the development and commercialization of intellectual property for gaming.

Yoseloff is the retired chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Shuffle Master, Inc., a NASDAQ Global Markets Company. During his 15-year association with the company he oversaw its growth from a virtual start up to a major worldwide provider of proprietary products for the gaming industry. Under his leadership, Shuffle Master was recognized by Business Week, Forbes and Fortune magazines as amongst the 100 fastest growing and best small public companies in America for five successive years. Additionally, during his tenure, a Wall Street Journal study identified Shuffle Master as one of the 35 most innovative consumer electronics companies in the world and number one on the list for the relevance of its intellectual property to the industry in which it operates.

Yoseloff is currently the managing member of Well Suited, LLC, a product creation company, and Big Bet Gaming, LLC, a product distribution company. He is recognized as a strategic thinker with a knack for identifying both opportunities for organic growth as well as appropriate acquisitions. He is an expert in the area of intellectual property and its commercialization as well as a “financial expert” under the terms of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Yoseloff holds both BA and MA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University. After graduation in 1970 he taught at Princeton and Arizona State University until, in 1975, he founded MicroTech, Inc., an early developer of software for the then nascent personal computer industry and GameTech, a developer and manufacturer of microprocessor-based coin-operated games. Two years later he sold the assets of these companies to Coleco Industries, and joined that company. During his eight years at Coleco, he rose to the position of Executive Vice President, the second-highest-ranking executive in the company, and oversaw much of that company’s growth from a $50 million plastic toy manufacturer to a $900 million industry leader. During this time period, the company produced such major products as handheld sports games, Colecovision and Cabbage Patch dolls.

During the 1980s, Yoseloff founded American Medical Management, Inc., an owner and operator of urgent care medical centers, which he sold to its lead physician. He also co-founded Recognition, Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of promotional and specialty items. He sold his interest in that company to its co-founder to concentrate on his efforts to found Advanced Gaming Concepts (“AGC”), a developer of software and concepts for the gaming industry. After a successful launch, and the development of numerous slot-machine games, primarily for Bally Gaming, he sold the assets of AGC to Shuffle Master in 1997.

During his prior teaching years, Yoseloff’s research was focused on the utilization of finite, combinatorial mathematical techniques to provide solutions to continuous mathematical problems. As a pioneer in this field, his doctoral thesis, “A Combinatorial Approach to the N-Representability of P-Density Matrices”, published in its entirety in the Journal of Mathematical Physics, when combined with the Pauli Exclusion Principle provided a probabilistic view of the expected behavior of subatomic particles, particularly bosons and fermions. This was the solution to a problem posed by Wolfgang Pauli, the noted physicist, almost 50 years earlier. Another important area of his research at that time was the application of combinatorial methods to problems in topology. Yoseloff was a fellow of the National Science Foundation, which, along with the Office of Naval Research, funded his research.

In addition to acting as chairman of the board at Shuffle Master, he has served on the board of Wells Gardner Electronics. Yoseloff is on leave of absence as a trustee of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Foundation and a major benefactor of the Boyd Law School at the university. In past years he has served on several other charitable boards.

He is the co-author of a college text entitled “Finite Mathematics” and holds over 150 issued or pending patents throughout the world related to the toy and gaming industries.